Archive for the ‘seo news’ Category
Wednesday, October 26th, 2022
The new trim video tool from YouTube turns your videos into 6-second videos that you can use for bumper ads. How convenient!
Machine learning strikes again. The new tool is now available globally in Google Ads, making it easy for advertisers to create bumper ads. The tool is powered by a machine learning model that identifies important scenes and brand elements from the original video and adapts them for shorter formats, Google says.
Not new(s). The tool was first introduced in 2019 as Bumper Machine and Google says that since then it “has helped hundreds of brands drive more reach, frequency and efficiency by effortlessly generating 6-second bumper ads. It improves on the Bumper Machine beta in many ways, with an enhanced machine learning model that can better select clips to adapt into shorter formats and an interface with more intuitive editing capabilities.”
Dig deeper. Learn more about the new trim tool in the Google Ads Help Center.
Why we care. The new tool can be used by advertisers to quickly create bumper ads if they don’t have the cutting and editing resources available to larger businesses. The new feature also allows you to test multiple ads much faster, as all of the videos created will be available in the asset library.
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Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Wednesday, October 26th, 2022
Google is anticipating a busy holiday season this year. In preparation, they have just announced three new Performance Max features to help advertisers plan effective campaigns, customize their asset strategy, and evaluate your results.
The Performance Planner
Advertisers can use the new Performance Planner to create campaign plans and understand how to invest their budgets while maximizing ROI. The new planner is being launched now and will be available to all advertisers in the coming weeks.
Planner features. With the Performance Planner, advertisers can forecast how their campaigns may perform in the future, as well as what can happen when certain elements like bidding strategies are implemented.
Customizing your asset strategy
Asset group scheduling. Asset group scheduling rolled out earlier this month. Now, you can add automated rules which allow you to schedule asset groups so they can be paused and enabled as needed. With scheduling, you can run ads at specific times of the day, or create and run different asset groups ahead of time.
More headlines to get your message across. The number of headlines you can upload to your Performance Max asset groups will increase from 5 to 15. Google says that by adding more headlines “you can take advantage of machine learning’s ability to create and test even more combinations to find the best-performing variations.”
Evaluating results
Performance explanations. Explanations help you identify what’s driving performance fluctuations, diagnose issues, and view recommendations. You can see these in the explanations panels and they are available for all Performance max campaigns.
First-party audience insights. A cookieless future is imminent, but it doesn’t have to mean the end of accurate targeting. Now, you can add your data segments as audience signals in your Performance max campaigns. In the coming weeks, your data segments will be added to audience insights in the Insights page. These insights may help you understand the value of your first-party data and see which of your customer lists may be converting best.
Dig deeper. You can read the announcement from Google here.
Best practices. Google suggests the following best practices as you plan your holiday campaigns:
- A few days leading up to peak holiday periods, make sure to adjust your Performance Max campaign budgets and ROAS or CPA targets to maximize your visibility when consumers are shopping.
- Consider using seasonality adjustments if you have a promotion, sale, or event where you expect to see drastic changes in conversion rates or values over a short period of time. You should only use seasonality adjustments for brief, infrequent events where you expect a temporary, but significant change (e.g. greater than 30%) that will last less than 7 days.
- If you want to prioritize certain products this holiday season, you can create a separate Performance Max campaign with its own target and budget to promote these products. However, if you just want to highlight new holiday creative assets, you can create a new asset group for these in your existing Performance Max campaigns and pause your evergreen asset groups, if needed.
Why we care. The new features may help Performance Max advertisers optimize, measure, and take advantage of additional asset features. If you’re using Performance max, you should test and utilize these new features as soon as possible, ahead of the holiday season, to drive the most benefit.
Regarding Google’s best practices, I’m skeptical of their advice to wait “A few days leading up to peak holiday periods” to make such drastic changes. Come on, Google.
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Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Tuesday, October 25th, 2022
Apple now has four new options for advertisers to drive visibility and downloads in the App Store. The new placements are:
- Today tab
- Search tab
- Search results
- Product pages — while browsing
The Today tab. The Today tab lets you reach people with high-impact creative on the front page of the App Store. The ad creative for the Today tab placements are based on a custom product page you set up in App Store Connect, and must be approved for advertising before your ad can run.
Search tab. Ads on this tab let you reach users before they search for something specific, with an ad that appears prominently at the top of the suggested apps list on the Search tab.
Search results ads. These let you reach users when they search for something specific, with an ad at the top of relevant search results. To match your ad with potential customers’ search terms, you can choose your own keywords or use the ones that Apple suggests. Matching is based on a direct signal of customers’ intent — their search query.
Product pages – while browsing. These ads let you reach people while they browse apps on relevant pages across the App Store, whether their journey started on the App Store or from an outside link. When interested users have scrolled to the bottom of relevant product pages, ads appear at the top of the You Might Also Like list.
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How ads are created. Apple ads are created using the metadata and assets you upload in App Store Connect. Search tab and product page ads feature app name, icon, and subtitle. Today tab ads are created using a custom product page you set up in App Store Connect. For search results ads, you can create a default ad that’s based on your app’s product page, or you can create ad variations from custom product pages you set up in App Store Connect.
Why we care. Advertisers who run ads on Apple Search now have four options to showcase their product or app in the App Store. Like with any new platform or product, advertisers should test the different placement options and compare performance to determine the best options for their business.
The post Four new Apple Search Ad placement options appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Tuesday, October 25th, 2022
A new Semrush study has found that zero-click Google searches aren’t quite the boogeyman they’ve been made out to be in SEO circles in recent years.
Where clicks went. Here’s an image summing up the findings for desktop Google searches:
Image credit: Semrush
- Organic clicks: 45.1%
- Zero clicks: 25.6%
- Keyword change (zero-click, query refinement): 17.9%
- Clicks to other Google properties (eg, images, news, shopping) 9.7%
- Paid clicks: 1.8%
And here’s an image summing up the findings for mobile Google searches:
Image credit: Semrush
- Organic clicks: 43.1%
- Keyword change (zero-click, query refinement): 29.3%
- Zero clicks: 17.3%
- Clicks to other Google properties (eg, images, news, shopping) 10.3%
- Paid clicks: 0.02%
Another interesting finding (though perhaps not entirely surprising) is that searchers didn’t spend much time analyzing search results, according to Semrush. Most searchers decide what to click on within 15 seconds.
So why are there zero clicks? There’s no one answer to this question. We know that consumers want answers – typically as fast as possible. Google now provides more of those answers than ever in the form of various search features (e.g., time, weather, movie showtimes, even direct answers).
Methodology. The study was conducted by Semrush in May, based on an anonymous sample of 20,000 U.S. desktop and mobile users. Semrush analyzed a total of 609,809 search queries (308,978 on desktop, 146,390 on mobile).
Semrush vs. past studies. SparkToro did a pair of studies (in 2019 and 2020). Here’s Search Engine Land’s coverage of those reports:
Both studies had, let’s say, issues. Barry Schwartz outlined some of those issues on Search Engine Roundtable.
Had there been another analysis this year or last by SparkToro, I’d imagine Google zero-click searches would be somewhere around 85%. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
Read the study. It’s definitely an interesting read that I highly recommend reading. See Semrush’s Zero-Clicks Study.
Why we care. Since 2019, there has been a lot of noise made about how Google is stealing clicks for itself. Google’s Danny Sullivan offered more context, pointing out that Google sends more traffic to websites every year and laying out some logical reasons why certain queries don’t end with a click on a website.
Admittedly, two things can be true – Google can send more traffic to websites than ever, and reduce the number of searches that otherwise would have gone to websites had it not introduced its own products or search features that directly compete in organic search.
In my opinion (as well as the opinions of many other smart SEO professionals I know): those past zero-click “studies” were misleading at best, and nonsense at worst. And they got way more attention than they deserved because the math never really added up. I applaud Semrush’s efforts in providing more context and a greater, more nuanced (read: less biased) analysis.
The post Google search study: 25.6% of desktop, 17.3% of mobile are zero-click appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Tuesday, October 25th, 2022
Email may have been around since the dawn of the internet, but the space doesn’t stand still. Email marketing, and the technology that enables it, have evolved to deal with challenges like spam and deliverability and also to take advantage of opportunities, such as the ever-increasing sophistication of data usage for hyper-personalization.
Developments in the email marketing platform environment, especially consolidation and integrations between parts of the tech stack, mean that the practice of email marketing is constantly changing. Additionally, external factors like Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection and Hide My Email, mean that marketers and their vendor partners need to adapt.
Download MarTech’s “Email Marketing Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” to stay up to date and learn about new and better features in the latest generation of email technology. This 51-page report is your source for the latest news, trends, opportunities and challenges facing this market as seen by industry leaders, vendors and their customers.
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Tuesday, October 25th, 2022
Every five years Search Engine Land likes to put together a sort of birthday tribute to the search engine, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics giant that we know as Google. Take a look at their big 2-0.
But given all that’s happened in search the last two years, we think it’s about time to pop the champagne, cut the cake, and settle in for a new, yearly, honoring.
Let’s get to it!
2021-2022
Keyword match types
Keyword match types seem to be the gift that keeps on giving, or in Google’s case, taking away. This time Google’s simplified phrase match worried advertisers with some acknowledging how similarly BMM and phrase match have behaved, and others denouncing the change as a move to strip away more data and controls from advertisers so that Google can extract as much profit from auctions as possible.
Farewell, broad-match modified keywords. Google expanded phrase-match to be included in broad match, to the chagrin of advertisers everywhere.
Audiences
Advertisers will be able to use connected TV campaigns to target viewers across YouTube and “most” other connected TV apps. The new development will bring affinity, in-market, and demographic audience segments to connected TVs.
Advertisers will be able to reuse audiences across campaigns. When you build an audience to use in a campaign, Google Ads will save it so you can use it again in a future campaign.
Google Ads is renaming some key terms in your audience report and throughout Google Ads. You may have seen this already in some accounts. Google revealed this via this help documentation in September 2021.
RSAs and the end of ETAs
Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) became the default ad type in 2021. RSAs allow advertisers to input multiple headlines and ad copy variations, and Google Ads uses machine learning to determine which variations to use based on what queries people are searching for.
An open beta allowed advertisers to see Display ads alongside search and YouTube for the first time in the Google Ads attribution report. Advertisers can see the ads in Top Paths, Model Comparison, Assisted Conversions and Path Metrics reports.
Automated vehicle ads were launched. The new format uses vehicle data feeds in Google Merchant Center to match users’ searches with ads.
Nine new policies were added to the three-strike system to target clickbait, misleading ad design, and more.
Automation
Bundled bid strategies have replaced standalone options. The Target CPA (tCPA) and Target ROAS (tROAS) Smart Bidding strategies will be bundled with the Maximize Conversions and Maximize Conversion Value bid strategies, respectively, Google announced Tuesday. Moving forward, Maximize Conversions will have an optional tCPA field, and Maximize Conversion Value will have an optional tROAS field.
Everyone’s favorite campaign type, Performance Max, became available to all advertisers. PMax includes Smart Shopping and Local campaigns, though Google eventually sunsetted Smart Shopping campaigns for good starting in January 2022.
Changes to automated extensions include extensions being shown together, an “Automatically Created Extensions” report, and the ability to add them at ad group, campaign, or account level.
Privacy Concerns Deepen
The depreciation of third-party cookies was supposed to happen in 2022 but was ultimately pushed to 2023. With that, an alternative targeting technology known as Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) was opened for advertiser testing in Q2 2021, with adoption slated for Q4 2022.
The FLEDGE sandbox has been unveiled along with plans to roll out several Privacy Sandbox initiatives on Android, including the Topics API, the FLEDGE API for custom audiences and remarketing, and the Attribution Reporting API. It began testing in March 2022.
Honorable mentions
2015-2020
Audiences
Google’s 20th gave rise to an era of predictive marketing, using AI and machine learning to identify intent and predict customer needs, behavior and marketing outcomes.
YouTube gains access to Google data for audience targeting, effectively improving ad targeting and measurement across search and YouTube.
GA4 was also introduced, giving users expanded predictive insights, deeper integration with Google Ads, cross-device measurement capabilities and more granular data controls.
Keyword match-type decline
The way we manage search terms has changed. Close variants are no longer what they used to be and marketers are being forced to adapt to machine learning. “Google says its machine learning is now good enough to determine when a query has the same intent as a keyword with a high enough rate of success that advertisers will see an overall performance lift.” Awkward.
Google has loosened the reigns on close variant keywords. Broad match is super broad, exact match is more like phrase match, and phrase match is, well, gone?
Privacy concerns have forced Google to limit Search terms reporting. In a statement from Google, a spokesperson said, “In order to maintain our standards of privacy and strengthen our protections around user data, we have made changes to our Search Terms Report to only include terms that a significant number of users searched for. We’re continuing to invest in new and efficient ways to share insights that enable advertisers to make critical business decisions.”
Automation ramps up
RSAs and the start of the end for Expanded Text Ads began in 2020. The option for text ads was no longer the default option in the Ads dropdown. Advertisers are seeing only Responsive Search Ad (RSA) and Call ad.
Local Campaigns were introduced and aimed to drive in-store visits. Google automatically optimizes ad delivery across Search, YouTube, Maps and websites and apps in its ad networks.
Smart Campaigns debuted and were designed for small and local businesses that don’t have dedicated marketing staff and may not even have websites.
Smart Campaigns became the default campaign type for new advertisers in Google Ads. The campaigns are almost entirely automated and goals include phone calls, website visits and requests for directions.
Honorable mentions
Other new advancements in Search included:
2000 launch to 2015
While this is by no means a complete list, here are a few product development highlights from when Google launched the AdWords platform in 2000, all the way up to their 15th birthday.
2000
Google launched its new self-service advertising program called AdWords. The program enabled “any advertiser to purchase individualized and affordable keyword advertising that appears instantly on the google.com search results page.”
The AdWords program replaced Google’s first ad program called Premium Sponsorships.
Check out this article we found from The Search Engine Report in 2000.
2006
In 2006 Google decided to push forward with testing newspaper ads. If you’re curious, you can read the results here.
In the same year, they also began testing in-stream video ads with Beet.tv.
2007
Google started promoting audio ads. The landing page it takes you to tells you to call one of Google’s sales offices if you wanted to advertise on the radio.
Pay-per-action ads were launched this year, allowing advertisers to only pay when their preferred action was completed, such as a sale or click.
Google also began testing its Keyword Tool, showing the number of the previous month’s searches. The tool shows actual numbers in search volume for the previous month for keywords.
Also happening this year, Google acquired DoubleClick from The New York Times for $3.1 billion.
In July Google announced that those personalized ads you see are influenced by previous searches. In response, Google said “What you’re seeing is that we look at the user’s previous query and see how well it intersects with the current query. If it’s significant, we’ll use it to help targeting on the current query. We simply look at what’s in the referring URL (every time you load a web page, the HTTP header includes your previous URL as the “referrer”).”
Google reaches 1 million advertisers! “An analyst from UBS estimated Google has between 1.3 million and 1.5 million advertisers. According to the analyst, it shows there is still room for a lot more growth in terms of the advertiser base.”
2008
Google pitched its media buying dashboard to very skeptical agencies.
Google also announced third-party tracking for the content network. Thanks, Google!
This same year, Google also began testing showing product ads in search results.
The Inside AdWords Google Blog announced that all US-based advertisers should now have the TV ads option in their account. In fact, you should see the option after logging in to your AdWords account at the bottom, where it says “Other Campaign Types.”
2009
Google’s newspaper ads initiative shuts down. Google said they are discontinuing this service because “the current Print Ads product is not the right solution.”
Google announced that they’re officially shutting down Google Audio Ads and Google Radio Automation.
The Google Base blog announced the launch of the new Google Merchant Center. The Merchant Center is replacing Google Base for those who submit products to Google.
Google Blog announced you can now buy YouTube Promoted Video ads directly in the Google AdWords console. Previously, all YouTube Promoted Video ads were managed on YouTube at ads.youtube.com.
Google has acquired AdMob (www.admob.com), a popular mobile display ad company, for $750 million. This acquisition gives Google access to AdMob’s more than 15,000 mobile Web sites and applications.
2010
Google has announced a new lab-type area called Google Ad Innovations, which is where it’ll “show you some of our latest ideas around advertising technologies and get your feedback.” Think of it as Google Labs for Ads.
Google has enabled access to the AdWords dashboard and other features for smartphone users. It’s configurable and provides on-the-go access to account data and stats. The new mobile interface is currently available for iPhone, Android and Palm/WebOS users.
Google starts testing a feature with a small number of advertisers in which a phone number can be included within the ad to help them more effectively engage with customers who prefer to connect over the phone.
A new keyword type, broad match modifier, begins testing.
Google Product Listing Ads are offered to all advertisers
2011
Google is now letting AdWords advertisers automatically optimize what ads display most based on conversion rates.
Google will begin charging $1.00 for calls completed using the unique number it provisions, but solely when the call originates from someone using a computer who dials the number themselves from a phone. When the call is from a mobile device, or someone on a PC calls from the computer itself by clicking, the standard click charges apply. Previously, the calls dialed on a phone were free, as they didn’t involve a click, per se.
Google rolls out the ability to target ads to users by interest based on their previous browsing activity, or behavior, to all of its advertisers.
Cost per lead tests start. Google is testing search and display versions of a cost-per-lead ad format that would allow users to request an advertiser contact them.
Google is opening wider a beta test of Dynamic Search Ads. This ad type is designed for retailers or other advertisers with a large, often-changing inventory. Google automatically generates ad copy, based on the advertiser’s template.
Google officially announced it would begin serving AdWords at the bottom of search engine results pages on Google.com.
2012
Google Product Search is renamed to Google Shopping and only merchants that paid will be listed.
Google is testing the effect of adding “Trusted Stores” badges to qualifying advertisers’ search ads, as it considers deploying the badges more widely.
Google introduced the ability to target more than 30,000 ZIP codes in AdWords, giving advertisers the ability to find potential customers in a familiar, granular way. Another new feature, Location Insertion, is aimed at letting advertisers with multiple locations create one ad, and have information dynamically inserted depending on the user’s query or location.
Google released a new report — Auction Insights — that helps marketers understand how their ads stand, compared to others in the same auctions.
Testing begins for a new ad format on its Hotel Finder product that lets marketers bid to appear at the top of search results. Promoted Hotels ads are ranked based on a combination of bid and quality score, and are sold on a CPC basis.
The remarketing tag gets a makeover.
Google has begun notifying merchants that it won’t allow them to continue listing weapons-related items for sale in Google Shopping.
2013
Google announced plans to add enhanced campaigns for AdWords to aid with campaign management catered to multiple-device users. The enhanced campaigns aimed to include advanced reports about users. This move was controversial among advertisers.
Ad group-level mobile bid adjustments started to roll out.
The AdWords Keyword Planner finally launches.
Google has announced the official beta for Image Extensions in AdWords.
Google announced the beta release of Review Extensions which allows advertisers to append a quote of endorsement from a reputable publication in their AdWords ads.
2014
CNBC reports that Google is now banning porn businesses from utilizing their ad network.
To help retailers maintain consistent visibility in PLAs, Google has launched “automatic item updates” in AdWords.
Google announced it is extending its popular product listing ads (PLAs) to retail and e-commerce sites across the Google Search Network. The ads are served via a new Google product called AdSense for Shopping.
Automated Extensions report starts rolling out.
AdWords 11 is launched. Google released a fully-redesigned version of AdWords Editor that supports several of the bulk editing features that have recently been added to the web interface and introduces new functionality to the desktop tool.
2015
By 2015 Google maintained nearly 64 percent of search share on desktop and almost 90 percent of mobile in the US.
The Google shared library is sunsetted.
Google launches dynamic structured snippets for AdWords. The automated extensions display industry-specific, structured information about products and services on advertisers’ sites.
Google has opened up access to its home services ad program in AdWords Express. The home services ad program launched in beta in the San Francisco area to connect service providers with local residents searching for help.
Starting in October, Google changed the conversions columns to include only those conversions that are set for optimization: i.e., optimized conversion actions.
Google launched Smart Goals in early December. Smart Goals are designed for advertisers that don’t or can’t have conversion tracking on their sites. It aggregates conversion data from the thousands of sites that opt to share data with Google Analytics and, with machine learning, identifies visits deemed most likely to convert on the advertiser’s site.
The post Google Ads turns 22: A look back at the biggest changes and advances in search appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Monday, October 24th, 2022
Understanding your target audience is essential to creating effective content. And one key way to do this is to use psychological classifications.
In Content creation: A psychological approach, I provided a sample of the psychological classifications that we have used, experimented with and tested.
In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into psychological profiling for better content creation, including:
- Classifications of personas.
- Culture/country differentiators.
- And some tools on how to develop your own customer personality profiling.
Why a psychological approach matters to content creation
By understanding the different psychological types of people, you can craft more effective messages to the right audience that either converts upper funnel or lower funnel.
Each type of person has different needs and desires, so digital content development that resonates with one type of person may not work for another.
For example, someone who is simply classified as a “Type A” personality is likely to respond well to content that is highly competitive and results-oriented.
On the other hand, a “Type B” personality is likely to be more responsive to content that is more relaxed and leisurely in tone. Your content can change vastly between groups.
Segmenting your personas
Segmenting your audience into different categories helps you craft messages that effectively resonate with each group.
To do this grouping, my preference is to either create or expand on your existing “personas.” When you understand the needs and wants of each persona, you can create ad campaigns that are more likely to result in vastly improved conversions.
Using the classifications that I used in my prior article Red, Blue, Yellow and Green, these personas all want the same thing, but you would need to communicate with each of them differently. For example, this is Dominant Red Fred.
Fred, who is a facility operations manager and a target customer of client X, provides us with some interesting insight into his personality under “Goals and Challenges.” (This “insight” was researched using a series of surveys and behavior analysis of existing clients.)
If we craft our content carefully based on Fred’s persona, it will result in more like-minded Freds coming through as new customers. This “psychographic” persona profile approach, which looks at people’s values, lifestyles, and personality traits, allows us to create ads or write content that appeals to people’s sense of self or their value system.
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Other classification systems
Outside of the system, I’ve been using, one of the most popular psychological classification systems is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The MBTI classifies people into 16 different personality types, based on four different dichotomies. These are:
- Extroversion vs. Introversion
- Sensing vs. Intuition
- Thinking vs. Feeling
- Judging vs. Perceiving
By understanding which of these dichotomies a person falls into, you can begin to understand their needs and desires.
For example, someone who is classified as an “Extroverted Sensing” type is likely to be very active and outgoing, and they may enjoy being in the moment and experiencing life to the fullest.
On the other hand, someone who is classified as an “Introverted Intuitive” type may be more introspective and focused on their own inner thoughts and feelings.
Each personality type has different needs, so content that resonates with one type of person may not work for another.
Just for fun, watch the video, The Different Types of Moms You Meet, and think about the personality classification of each person.
Psychographic behaviors of countries and cultures
As you dig into all of this and start creating micro-characters of your personas, remember that if you do broader, multi-lingual or multi-cultural marketing, you can actually create assumptive characteristics of entire cultures.
Similar to how we ourselves are classified, our country-related behavior or personas can fall nicely into these buckets, too.
In the following color chart presented in my last article, you can see countries falling into each characteristic.
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Finding and extrapolating behavioral data
We map our clients’ own customers in two ways. First is by utilizing SurveyMonkey to survey all of our clients with a multitude of personality assessment questions.
In exchange for filling out the survey, we may provide the respondents with a huge one-time discount code, a gift card or an upgrade to a more premium version of our client’s site. We also use questions as part of a more advanced loyalty program.
For example, if you would like to join the VIP section of our website, please fill in this form (which includes personality assessment questions).
Another fantastic resource, and one of my favorites, is using Crystal, a Chrome extension for LinkedIn. Here is an example of just a random (myself) person’s assessment from the plugin.
Analyzing your customers and opportunities for success
Once we have developed personas and a system of targeting your audiences through their personalities, the next step is to analyze the makeup of your existing database.
This is important so that you can see behavior areas where we are weak in promoting.
For example, from this sample, you could see that we are driving a good set of Influential and Compliant personality types. But the Dominant and Steady traits are falling out.
After some deep research, we found something completely unexpected.
The client has appealed to a large audience that ironically has the same psychological profile classifications as the digital marketing team. Here is the content writing team.
This is further proof that what one group finds as engaging content, the other group may not. We have to be careful that our marketing department speaks to all categories of personality types, not just the ones that they are in.
So we asked our client’s content team to rewrite content based on each classification and test that content.
Surprisingly, with a focus on content campaigns targeted to each personality type, our new client development went through the roof.
Create marketing content that resonates
Using psychographic profiling may sound creepy. But in the end, humans are tribal by nature.
We communicate often to be liked and understood. Most of the time, we end up in our own pool or tribe of like-minded individuals.
Understanding your existing clients and where they fall within the classification spectrum will help you:
- Write content for your customers.
- Understand whether your marketing content is only attracting a certain behavior group.
That means by writing for all types of classifications, rather than a single type classification, you may find hidden gold in improved conversions, increased audiences, and more fans of your brand.
I would encourage everyone to experiment, much as I have, to find what works and what doesn’t.
Begin to develop a relationship with your customers rather than leaving them out to feel like just another number in a database.
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Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Monday, October 24th, 2022
A content audit is the act of taking inventory of your content to understand it on two levels:
- How it’s working together as a whole (the bird’s eye view).
- How each piece is working individually (the view from the weeds).
It’s a task many dread, but one you shouldn’t sweat.
Content audits aren’t a necessary evil, but rather a smart and strategic way to review your past content efforts and get a clear view of how they help (or hinder) your goals.
In short, it’s a much-needed cog in the machinery of a working content strategy – and not difficult to do, once you know how.
There are seven basic steps to do a content audit:
- Set clear goals.
- Narrow your focus: choose a type of content to audit.
- Play content librarian (gather, organize, and categorize).
- Play content detective (audit and analyze).
- Assess your findings and make a plan.
- Take action.
- Tweak your content strategy based on your findings.
Let’s talk through each one.
How to do a content audit in seven steps
Consider this your content audit checklist.
The first thing you need to do before diving into your own content audit?
Figure out your goals – what are you hoping to get out of this whole thing?
1. Set clear goals
Ultimately, a content audit helps you understand how your content is performing and how you can improve it to meet your specific goals. Setting those goals before you get started is therefore very important.
Consider: What do you hope to accomplish with your content audit? Here are some common aims:
Goal 1: Improve your SEO to bring in more traffic and leads
Properly optimized content will rank better in Google, which will bring in more traffic and leads to your site.
That means, to hit this goal, you need to analyze your content to ensure certain benchmark optimization standards are in place for each piece, like:
- Meta title and description.
- Keyword placement.
- Structured content with keyword-optimized headers.
- Images with alt tags.
- Internal and external links.
- Whether your focus keywords are still winnable (keyword difficulty, search volume, competition).
You’ll also need to evaluate each piece, where it ranks in Google (if at all), and make a plan to update, rewrite, keep, or delete it based on its performance and how that fits into your strategy.
Goal 2: Improve engagement to ensure your content gets read
Engaging content is better at building trust and loyalty and converts better. With the goal of improving engagement across your content, your audit should focus on how readers interact with your pages and how you can improve their usability.
Look at metrics like:
- Traffic
- Social shares
- Comments
- Page speed
- Bounce rate (keeping in mind a high bounce rate can be misleading – to get a truer picture of what visitors are doing, compare this metric in context with related metrics, like time on page)
- Link health (are any links broken? Incorrect? Do you have enough internal links?)
- Conversions (are people taking action after engaging?)
Goal 3: Improve your conversion rates to bring in more sign-ups, opt-ins, and sales
Improving conversion rates from your content is a matter of figuring out which pieces are converting well and which are not, as well as looking at the function and usability of your content.
On top of that, you’ll need to make sure you have content for every stage of the buyer’s journey. A content audit will help you identify any gaps you need to fill.
Some of the data you might look at with this goal include:
- Pageviews.
- Average time on page.
- Bounce rate.
- Conversion rate.
- Calls to action (quality, relevance, and quantity).
- Whether forms and other interactive elements work correctly.
2. Narrow your focus: choose a type of content to audit
Next, think about narrowing down your audit to a specific type of site content. This will make the task more manageable. For example, focus only on blog content, just on core website content, or solely on product or service pages.
The type of content you audit (or whether you choose to do a full audit of every single type) depends on the size of your website, your individual needs as a business/organization, and if one person is doing the auditing versus a team of people.
If you choose to do it by type, once you complete an audit, you can audit the other types with the same steps down the road.
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3. Play content librarian (gather, organize, and categorize)
It’s time to nudge your inner librarian into being. You’ll need her attention to detail and organizational prowess for this next part.
With goals and content type nailed down, it’s time to gather the URLs of the content you’ll audit and organize/categorize them so you can analyze how well they’re working.
While you can definitely gather and organize URLs manually in a spreadsheet (Google Sheets, Airtable and Excel are all good options), a content audit tool will come in handy at this point. A good one will gather the URLs for you along with associated data like backlinks, social shares, word count, and more. If you have a large site, this will save you a ton of time and headaches.
A few worthy content audit tools that do all this include Semrush’s Content Audit Tool and Screaming Frog SEO Spider. (Keep in mind: These tools rely heavily on your sitemap to do their job. If you don’t have one, you can generate one with a different free tool like XML-Sitemaps.)
Semrush Content Audit Tool example
If, however, you’re doing your audit manually, you’ll need to look in multiple places to find the data associated with each piece (for example, Google Analytics and PageSpeed Insights for metrics, WordPress or your content calendar for keywords, word count, and meta information, etc.).
Finally, don’t forget to categorize your content to make it easier to analyze. Here’s some information you might include in your spreadsheet, based on your goals:
Basic info:
- URL
- Last updated
- Author
- Word count
- Content type
Metadata and keyword information:
- Focus keyword
- Keyword difficulty
- Search volume
- Meta description
- Meta title/H1
Metrics:
- Pageviews
- Social shares
- Backlinks
- Average Google position
- Time on page
- Bounce rate
- Page speed
Example spreadsheet set-up for a content audit
4. Play content detective (audit and analyze)
Here comes the fun part of this whole endeavor (yes, it exists!).
Put on your detective hat à la Sherlock Holmes and whip out your magnifying glass.
Once you’ve gathered the data, it’s time to analyze what’s in front of you and piece together insights and opportunities for action and improvement.
At this stage, it’s helpful to further categorize your content based on your goals. (If you’re working in a spreadsheet, color-coding is a great way to visualize each category, by the way.)
- Content underperformers – Which pieces aren’t performing as well as you’d like?
- Content winners – Which pieces are hitting it out of the park?
- Thin content – Which pieces are too short and unsatisfying for the topic they address?
- Outdated content – Which pieces are old or irrelevant?
- Missing information – Which pieces are missing key information, like a meta description, keyword-optimized headers, CTAs, or correct links?
5. Assess your findings and make a plan
After you’ve sifted through your content and further categorized it based on its performance, composition, or optimization, it’s time to decide what to do with each one and record that planned action in your audit.
You have four options: update, rewrite, keep, or remove.
Here are some examples of how to further categorize your content for future action:
Update/tweak if:
- The piece is getting recent traffic but has some outdated aspects or areas you could rewrite/improve.
- The piece is mostly relevant but has a few outdated statistics.
- The piece is good content but is missing some metas or SEO opportunities that could help it rank better.
Rewrite if:
- The piece is thin and poor quality but targets a great keyword opportunity for your business.
- The topic is evergreen but the piece isn’t climbing in performance after at least 6-8 months. (Most experts recommend waiting at least 3-6 months to see results from content, but that depends on what results you’re looking for. It may take up to a year depending on your goals!)
Keep if:
- The content piece performs well (it pulls in decent or steady traffic, it converts well, or if people stay to read it and engage with your site).
- The piece is relevant, high-quality, and correctly optimized, but underperforming – it might just need more time to climb the rankings in Google.
Remove if:
- The content is 2-3 years old, irrelevant, thin, gets no traffic, and is poorly written or poorly optimized.
- The content is all of the above and targets a keyword that’s out of your scope (e.g., the keyword difficulty score is too hard, the competition includes major brands with much more authority, etc.).
6. Take action
By now, you have a content audit completed that includes a wealth of information. It’s time to act on it.
Start by assigning a priority to each content piece. For example, perhaps one piece that’s earmarked for an update is earning a ton of traffic right now. That would be a good reason to place it higher on your priority list, so you can take advantage of the extra traffic coming in.
Or, perhaps you want to start with the easiest, quickest action items (like fixing a few broken links or adding meta titles to pieces without them) and build up to the bigger tasks (like the pieces that need a wholesale rewrite). Learn more about upgrading your content.
7. Tweak your content strategy based on your findings
Doing a content audit is a learning experience, to say the least. To that end, don’t forget to analyze and reflect on it once you’re done. You can come up with some major takeaways you can use in your content strategy moving forward.
Ask yourself:
- How hard was it to gather your content assets and the related data? Would it be worthwhile to invest in tools to make it easier next time?
- Could you be documenting your content creation process better, such as in your content calendar?
- Are you keeping up with tracking and measuring your content performance pretty well, or did you come across some major surprises during your audit?
- How could you track and measure better in the future?
- Were there any gaping holes in your content? Could you tweak your strategy to fill these holes?
- Do you currently have a strategy and process for updating old content, or can you create one?
Note how deeply intertwined a content audit is with a content strategy. Don’t have a content strategy? You need one to ensure consistency in your content, meet your goals, track your performance, and stay organized.
Strategy is often what determines the difference between winning and losing content endeavors. 62% of the most successful content marketers have one, and it helps them reach major brand goals that lead to success.
Bottom line: Don’t put the horse before the cart if you don’t have a content strategy (or don’t have one documented) yet. Only do a content audit if you have plans to build one, or you have one in place.
Repeat your content audits regularly for the best results
Once you do a content audit, you never have to do one again. Right?
…Right?
Wrong. Content audits should be repeated at least yearly, if not more often (quarterly is common).
Why? If you’re doing it right, your content ecosystem should be constantly expanding, much like the universe.
Additionally, basic content standards – like the ones Google sets for ranking – are always changing, too. If you aren’t on top of auditing your content and consistently making changes, updates, and tweaks where needed, it will become irrelevant and useless to both consumers and your bottom line.
Best advice?
Create and implement a content strategy. Do regular content audits to ensure all of your pages are consistently working to help you meet your goals. Watch greater success come rolling in.
The post How to do a content audit as painlessly as possible appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Saturday, October 22nd, 2022
All clients review agencies for “fit.”
They line up the RFP cattle call, or back-to-back meetings between a handful of agencies to contrast and compare.
However, almost zero agencies review clients in return.
Instead, they’re too eager, living hand to mouth, to take on all clients at all times as long as they have a pulse and a checkbook.
It makes sense. You need to keep the lights on and employees fed. But it almost always backfires at least a few times each year.
Client A is actually costing you money in the long run. Client B keeps asking for caviar on a sardines budget. And Client C is simply just an a-hole.
Counterintuitively, that’s why the best thing an agency can do is to routinely fire clients on a regular basis. Not once a year, but once a month or quarter.
Here’s why.
When to fire a client: Recognize you have a problem (profitability, notoriety and fit)
Just like any good 12-step program, start by recognizing you have a problem.
You should have never touched that one client with a 10-foot pole. You were a terrible fit for that other client last summer.
Thankfully, you can relax. This is totally normal.
Profitability
The first issue that sabotages client engagement is usually profitability (not contract value).
Either you:
- Undercharged from the get-go, too eager to land the client that you failed to properly scope or understand the full specifications.
- Or the project costs that worked when you started a ~year ago don’t line up with your agency’s current headcount, overhead, and profitability targets.
Fortunately, this issue is also pretty easy to fix. You can (and should) regularly:
Simply raise rates at regular intervals for each client. Not every month or quarter necessarily, but definitely every year.
Continue on a “discounted rate” only if they meet your payment terms, like paying for the quarter or annual contract upfront to help your cash flow. This is especially key on larger accounts with enterprise companies that seem to think you’re a bank that extends credit to fund their project resources for… infinity? While they pay slooooooooooowwwllyyy.
Institute a new “change order” policy to avoid scope creep. My dad always used to say “what you permit, you promote.” Drove me nuts at the time and still rings in my ears.
But 100% true when it comes to managing client relationships and expectations.
Next time a client requests something out of scope (and every time hereafter), you can accommodate it only for an extra fee.
Move your higher-cost and better resources (read: people) off their account to newer, higher-paying clients (and substitute them with cheaper ones).
This sleight-of-hand trick instantly improves margins without the client being the wiser. (Obviously, don’t let quality drop during this transition!)
Routinely sticking to these four principles should clean up ~80% of your agency’s profitability issues.
Unfortunately, though, profitability isn’t the only reason a client engagement goes sour.
Mismatch with client expectations
The second most common, and harder to fix, is a mismatch with client expectations.
They expect business class on an economy budget.
They’re a tiny, no-name, commoditized brand that thinks it should be on the cover of TechCrunch or The New York Times.
Or they expect results yesterday, despite not having the internal resources to support any of the initiatives you’re trying to get off the ground.
In these cases, education early and often is key.
Also, be direct and transparent. Be nice and polite, but firm.
The minute you get backed into the “vendor” corner, simply fulfilling orders and being a pushover, you’re screwed.
This mismatch issue also brings to light a tertiary issue: “fit.”
Fit
Maybe you sold a service or project you’re actually unequipped to deliver.
Or maybe there’s just a personality difference between your firm’s people and the client’s point of contact.
Either way, healthy agency engagements are more marriage, less Tinder. “Fit” is as important as budget.
There’s usually a variety of reasons why “fit” gets distorted and the relationship blows up in your face. And depressingly, there’s almost nothing you can do to improve fit.
Leaving you with only one obvious option.
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5 simple steps to firing clients once and for all
Subscription businesses like SaaS measure things like “churn” to assess how well they’re doing in satisfying customers.
From a 30,000-foot level, it’s a measure of how many people sign up and then bounce (seemingly to find some other alternative).
Generally speaking, a SaaS business then wants its churn rate to be as low as humanly possible because that means its product is “stickier” and therefore its business is way more profitable.
Service businesses often try to measure similar “churn” metrics. However, they’re missing the obvious point.
As a completely different business model, there is such a thing as churn being “too low” when it comes to clients.
In other words, you actually want clients to regularly churn out, assuming:
- They’re still happy with the service you delivered so they’ll provide a testimonial and referrals.
- That you have a steady stream of eager prospects willing to engage you at a higher rate (which is a topic for another day).
You obviously don’t want large, well-paying, nice clients to churn that often.
But you absolutely want less profitable, obscure, mismatched, unfriendly clients to see the door on a regular basis.
Replacing one for the other almost instantly:
- Frees up your biggest bottleneck – people! – to take on new accounts without constantly needing to hire and fire under-performers as your deal flow ebbs and well, flows.
- Improves your profitability because it’s often easier to start new clients at a significantly higher rate than ask (read: force) old clients to pony up more dough for seemingly the same exact level of service.
- Both of those two moves, together, actually result in giving you less work to do while making the same (or more) – ‘cause you and your team deserve vacations sometimes, too.
- Last but not least, it allows you to ideally work with bigger brand names which provide an almost instant lift to the credibility of your agency and helps “pre-sell” other prospects who’ve been sitting on the fence for months (or years).
So it’s best to be blunt and polite. But also rip the bandaid off ASAP.
Here’s how to fire clients nicely.
1. Time client firings with natural project conclusions or times of year
For instance, if a major milestone is going to be complete by the end of this quarter, that would be a perfect target date to…
2. Give plenty of notice
Tell them at least a month in advance (maybe more) that it’s coming to help set expectations. This also gives you some time to…
3. Plan ahead
You can:
- Provide them with some alternatives for you.
- Be able to forecast new work you have coming through the door so you can easily transition your team from one account to the next.
If they want to try to continue working together, you can…
4. Significantly raise rates for future work
This kinda gives them a hint. Every client gets put out when you try to ask for more money. Especially a lot more money.
Now imagine you 2X or 5X or even 10X their next project cost if they want to continue working together. They’ll almost always get the hint and go seek out cheaper alternatives. This also assumes the split will be amicable.
Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case. So here’s how to fire a client with a not-so-nice script…
5. Some client firings aren’t always that nice
Look: life ain’t a fairy tale. Sorry to be a spoiler.
As a service professional, you need to be kinda like a mercenary. You parachute in to get s#*t done. Then, you move on to wherever the next project takes you.
Some clients routinely “take the piss” by:
- Paying you well after previously agreed upon dates.
- Demanding things that were never in scope.
- Blaming you for their own internal issues.
- Talking down to your staff.
- Just simply being a pain in the @$$ to deal with.
So with these people, you can be blunter and skip the foreplay of the last four points:
- “Effective immediately, we’re canceling our agreement with you due to… (list the points in the preceding sentence). After [XYY] date you will no longer have access to [ABC] resources.”
And… that’s it.
No elaborate script or heartfelt breakup needed. Remember that you’re a Navy Seal, not an untrained boot who’s never seen combat.
You can and should explain your reasoning and thought process to nice clients that are sadly no longer a good fit for where your agency is trying to go. Help them find another good shepherd to lead their flock.
But…
You absolutely don’t need to apologize or explain anything to jerks. They’re on their own. Because they all most likely think you’re an idiot already, unable to possibly live and breathe the same airspace as their genius.
So stop putting up with their crap, sapping your team’s morale, and damaging your longer-term reputation.
Let them go hire and fire 10 other agencies before they realize that they, not you, were the problem all along.
Firing a client is inevitable
You aren’t a therapist or a shrink.
The best agencies are battle-hardened teams of trained, skilled specialists. You get hired to create deliverables, design websites, problem-solve, rank stuff, increase ROAS, and more.
But nowhere in your MSAs or SOWs does it say: fix every client’s problem, no matter what.
Because there are tons of client problems that you literally can’t do anything about, like:
- Bad internal support or champions.
- An undifferentiated service or product in a crowded space.
- Having the wrong people leading the wrong projects.
- Under-qualified employees or HIPPOS (highest paid person’s opinion) calling the shots.
- Poor/nonexistent processes and workflows to coordinate complex projects and scale results.
- Under-resourced teams with inappropriately-aggressive timelines.
- And lots, lots more.
You can’t save everyone.
Help the good, but no-longer-a-good-fit clients land on their feet when transitioning them out of your agency.
But don’t be afraid to cut the jerks loose today and let them be someone else’s problem to deal with tomorrow.
The post Why you should fire clients more often (and how to do it the right way) appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Saturday, October 22nd, 2022
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